Monitoring, Management & Location Tracking

Summary: ALE is the Analytics Location Engine used to feed data to Meridian. An SSL tunnel is established between the two and the ALE ID is used to map the data from ALE to a Location in Meridian.

Introduction : Analytics Location Engine is used to feed client location data into Meridian.

Configuration Steps :

On ALE Server :

1) Ensure we have port 443 open from ALE to the Meridian cloud server

2) In order to establish a tunnel, customer has to be first "provisioned" by Meridian. They need to have a location created on https://edit.meridianapps.com/

3) The tunnel can be established from ALE CLI using the following command :

/etc/init.d/meridian-tunnel start

ALE uses NBAPISSLBridge for sending data to outside "cloud" applications. To send data to multiple application partners, multiple instances of nbapisslbridge can be started for different desitnations.

On Meridian Server :

1) Login to the Meridian account and go to Account > Settings > RTLS Setup



2) Enter the ALE ID to allow ALE server to send location data to Meridian. This ID is unique to your ALE server and can be obtained from the About tab in the ALE UI.

Verification :

on ALE :

We can find details of the tunnel establishment in /opt/ale/var/log/wstunnel-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar/current

Following lines verify a successful connection

[CLIENT] Connecting with client ID of '52540072012C'
[CLIENT] WebSocket connecting to
wss://location.meridianapps.com:443...
 [CLIENT] WebSocket connected to location.meridianapps.com:443

Note : ALE - Meridian Tunnel service may go down upon a reboot. Please follow the KB in related links to ensure the tunnel restores upon reboot

on Meridian :

Go to BLUDOT > Viewer. You should see clients represented by Blue dots and their movements on the MAP indicating the data being received from the ALE.

Related Links:

https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/Troubleshooting/Why-does-ALE-meridian-tunnel-service-is-down-when-the-server-is-rebooted